From: youkneek@aol.com (Youkneek)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative
Subject: NEW: The Time After by Amperage
Date: 6 Jun 1996 16:36:37 -0400
Poster's Note: I'm posting this for Amperage, at her request.
Wish I could claim credit for writing it but it's all hers. She's
temporarily off-line doing "hands-on angst research" for future
stories and cannot answer email directly. She asks that you send
any comments, questions, etc. to me at youkneek@aol.com or to
livengoo@tiac.net and we can forward them to her by snail mail.
I checked my copy of this story and she finished it on June 11th of
1995.
Disclaimer: This story is based on the characters created by Chris
Carter, Ten Thirteen Productions and Fox Broadcasting. Used without
permission and no infringement is intended. Not for resale. No
redistribution without the express permission of the author.
5/17/96
Okay, this is something that's been kicking around my hard drive
for about a year or so. Wrote it maybe last summer? Somebody who
read it when I wrote it help me out. . .just saw the season finale.
In between SCREAMS I kept thinking how nicely this story would go.
. .so anyway, here it is. . .September is a long, long, long way
away. . .
The Time After
by Amperage
The darkness is eternal. My father taught me that, not
in words, but in deeds. He sat through black stuff nights and
static heat echoing with the rumble of distant thunder.
Crickets sounded along the perimeters and through the endless
summer heat. And he knew night was eternal, that it never
ended and that, in it, the monsters moved. He was a tall man,
sinewy and strong, and his eyes were sad, even when he smiled.
He sat up most nights, looking into the skies pretending.
Pretending that Mother was not dead, that everything was
perfect; pretending, I think, that it was not dark at all.
Karol Ann, an Ab woman who cooked and cleaned for us and
at night slept with Ryan over the stable so that she could
make babies, told me that once there had been another world.
There had been no aliens, no lights in the skies. She taught
me young not to question my father or the shadowy world of the
Visitors which kept us among the privileged few.
It was a long, lazy day. Selections were being made in
the ghettos, so I was forbidden to go riding in the parks;
occasionally an ab who was chosen found his way into the
parks, so they were off-limits to me on such days. I was
bored, being restricted to the household grounds, and I began
a quiet exploration of the house in frustration. I was not
allowed into fathers' study, but I went into his bedroom
sometimes, to say good night. I did not know much about his
bedroom, but it was not a very frightening place. Once upon
a time there had been a television, but now, only Abs watched
it. Privileged were told not to, because there were signals
on it. Karol Ann watched it and I said nothing to her, but I
did not watch. I knew, because of that, because of the
lulling "stories," that she would not catch me rifling through
my father's things, and so, on some whim I cannot name, I
looked through his nightstand. I found two guns, two
flashlights, two clip-on ID tags marked FBI in large letters,
two folded leather badges.
I opened the first badge and stopped exploring, stood
there, biting my lip, staring.
She had red hair like mine, and eyes that fairly
glittered in the sunlight. She had my name as well. Dana.
I stood staring, I do not know how long. Dana Scully. With
red hair and blue eyes and a raised chin. My mother.
I did not hear my father come in. Suddenly he stood in
the doorway of his bedroom in his uniform of blue jeans and
shirt--I never saw him in any other clothes, he said the
Visitors didn't care what he wore and he liked those clothes.
He said nothing, staring at me, merely tightened his lips. He
was always tired on days of selections, although he had very
little to actually do with selections.
In the past, I had heard him yelling at Karol Ann and
Ryan, at the workers who came to our house on occasion to
disturb him. He yelled at most people, and they jumped to
obey him; if they did not jump fast enough he hit them. I had
seen him whip a man once, taken him out in the yard and belted
him until the man could only quiver. I knew he got angry,
impossibly
angry. I had seen him thus before. He never yelled at me. I
thought
he would for this though, and I welcomed it. I welcomed his rage.
I
had seen ab women beating their children with belts. I thought my
father would take the belt out of his loops and hit me. Instead he
stared at me, steel-eyed. I thought he would be angry.
"Your mother was a beautiful woman. If you want to see
other pictures, they're in the bottom drawer of my chest. I'm
sorry I don't talk about her. It's too hard for me." He
dropped his head.
I nodded, mouth still dry, hands still trembling with
fear. I must have been all of 8. I stared at him a long
time. "What does this mean? Federal Department of
Investigations?" I asked, finally.
"It was. . .hasn't Skinner begun your history lessons
yet?" He looked at me, stared into my eyes.
I shook my head. "There was a thing called the United
States once. I know that. Karol Ann told me that they took
care of people and things were nice then."
Father's mouth twisted cruelly. "Karol Ann needs to
learn her place and that the past will never come back. Tell
Skinner he is to begin your lessons into why."
I frowned, puzzled.
"Skinner will understand." Father assured me.
I considered the badge. "May I keep this?" I asked.
He shook his head. "I need her credentials to sleep some
nights or Headmaster has to come and help me sleep."
Headmaster was the Visitor assigned to my father. When
father was what Karol Anne called "fragile" or really upset
then Headmaster came and made things better somehow. He came
fairly often.
"Dana Scully." I said softly and put the badge back
where I had found it.
I forgot to tell Skinner the next day. Skinner lived in
the worker sector and came over every morning to teach me. He
was older than my father and sometimes forgot to make the
proper obeisance. Father ignored it. He tried to make life
easier for the man, had gotten him the post as my tutor. I
did not know anything else about Skinner then. Though I would
learn.
That afternoon, however, when lessons were over and I had
taken my exercise on Cheyenne, the roan mare father had gotten
me for my 6th birthday, riding through the parks, I went back
to the house, changed out of my riding clothes and sat in
front of the drawer.
I did not understand much. There were photos of a short
red-headed woman. She was usually smiling, although one
photo, of her in faded shorts, with her hair back in a
ponytail, showed her frown. She was not in many photos with
my father. There were other people in many of the
photographs. There were some pictures of my father. He
smiled sometimes, sometimes not. He looked very different.
He did not look like the stern taskmaster he was when
I knew him, one of the privileged. There were none of the
scars on his face or legs. At bottom there were a very few
photos of a girl. With dark eyes and dark hair. She was with
a dark haired boy in one or two. I wondered who she was, who
they were, briefly, and went back to the photos of my mother.
He came in when the shadows were low across the land, and
he found me there, staring at a large portrait of my mother,
trying to see myself in her face. "Did you talk to Skinner?"
He asked.
"No, Father." I rose respectfully. "I forgot."
Father nodded. "I regretted asking Skinner to tell you.
He still has a great deal of bitterness. . ." Father did a
strange thing for him. He knelt down on the smooth stone
floor, motioned for me to follow. We looked through the
photographs silently. My father brushed the big formal
portrait I held. "Once, many, many years ago, the Visitors
were myth and rumour."
"Karol Ann told me that."
Father nodded. His eyes cataloged something. I felt a
shiver of fear for Karol Ann.
"When I was 12, they took my sister. Her name was
Samantha. I had been babysitting her when she disappeared."
He took out a photo of the girl. "This was Samantha." The
picture stayed in his lap.
Samantha was my middle name. I did not know there had
been a Samantha before me. I stared at the photo. She did
look like my father.
"I didn't know what had happened to her. . .I felt
guilty. They thought someone had kidnapped her. . ." His eyes
travelled to some distant place I could not go.
"I was educated at Oxford University--that veritable
institution that refuses to die; you'll go there when you're
14--I went to work at the FBI afterwards. In those days there
were governments, independently run. Ours, for this part of
the world, was known as the United States of America. Skinner
will teach you those political systems as you get older.
Right now, know that I was an investigator for this system and
the department was called the Federal Bureau of
Investigations. FBI. When really bad things happened I came
and I tried to figure it out. For a long time I caught serial
killers. Those were people who killed many people over a long
period of time."
It sounded like noble work. "Is that what Mother did?"
Father smiled. "Let me get to it, little Dana." He
paused.
"I started remembering Samantha's abduction and I became
interested in UFO's. In things that were unexplainable. And
those were the things I investigated. I believed there were
Aliens and very few people, in that time, did. I was
ridiculed, called insane. Your mother was sent to spy on me,
so they could say I was either crazy or I did my work in such
a way that it was inadequate. Instead she became my best
friend. She was an investigator like me."
"And you fell in love and got married." I prompted.
"No." Father smiled, a smile I rarely saw. "No. We
never fell in love and married. She was like my sister."
"But you had to have had sex." I questioned, puzzled.
Even I knew how babies were born. I'd seen Abs doing it in
the ghettos.
Father laughed. A real, healthy laugh, rarely heard if
ever. "Dana dear, let me finish my story."
I nodded.
"We discovered that the government knew about the Aliens,
was doing horrific experiments. Your mother was kidnapped
once and. . .used. . ." His throat worked convulsively. "But
we worked and did everything we could. . .but there were
always those in the shadows moving us like puppets. . .anyway,
there was a war. A war is when governments got mad and fought
each other. Many, many people died. Our war started as a
trade dispute and it got angrier and angrier. Anyway, we
started a war. And someone shot this thing down. And
suddenly everyone knew that there were aliens. And then they
. . .umm. . .this is really hard to explain. . ." Father
closed his eyes, was silent for a minute or two.
"The visitors stepped in and used our war as an excuse.
They said they wanted to help us. I didn't believe a word of
it and neither did your mother. We argued ourselves blue,
trying to convince people to mount a defensive, not to trust
them or trust the government. But no one listened. Anyway,
the Visitors came in and . . .well, there we were. . .and once
they were in place. . .we're all aborigines, all except those
like you and me whom the Visitors have changed. And they're
exploiting us, exploiting the planet."
"I'm not an ab." I responded.
Father grinned. "No, you're not. Neither am I. My
father had my DNA changed before I was born and the visitors
were so interested in what the humans did that they. . .
experimented with me and then experimented with my sister too.
Your mother was an ab, but then our government experimented on
her, so she wasn't an ab either. Umm. . .anyway, they made
your mother and me high ups, important people. If we refused
to do our work, they killed abs until we went back to work."
He sighed heavily, his eyes tracked something floating in the
air, something only he could see.
"There are some visitors who think what's going on is
wrong. Headmaster is assigned to me, and he thinks its
wrong." He said quietly.
"Why is his name Headmaster?" I was too young to
understand how completely unheard of it was for a Visitor to
take care of a human.
"Because he teaches me. It isn't his name, really; I
just call him that. He also keeps me from going crazy. I'm
one of the few people who can interact with all the different
Visitors for extended periods without going crazy, but
sometimes it does hurt me. Headmaster is half Visitor Half
human and he knows how to make me better. I have my moments
though. . ."
"Like last September when you tore up the house."
"Like last September when I tore up the house." He agreed
with a smile. "Exactly. Headmaster had them put me in
restraints for a few days. Do you remember that?"
I nodded. He had been impossible to understand, knocking
things off shelves, putting his hand through the windows,
beating himself against the walls, tearing apart clothes.
Headmaster had come with two or three others like him and they
had held Father down while Headmaster calmed my father. Then
a group of workers came and took him. He came back several
days later, very quiet, and Headmaster had been an almost
constant presence in the house for several weeks afterwards.
I had been frightened, not understanding, and Karol Ann would
not discuss it with me. Skinner had said that my father did
important work and sometimes he had problems.
Father began speaking again. "They want you to do liaison
work, like I do, when you're big. You won't go crazy like I
do though. Your genetic structure has been. . .changed. .
.more."
I nodded, stopped thinking about Father's bad times.
"What happened to my mother? How was I born if you didn't
have sex?"
"All right. Scully. . .umm. . .we did our work out of
guilt. . .I still do. If I ever quit they start killing and
don't stop until I start again. . .they took some of my sperm
and one of your mother's eggs and changed it and implanted it.
As for sex--that was between your mother and me what we did or
did not do. But you were not created through sex. They made
us have a child because we had enough emotional ties to be
able to raise a child together and because of my genes."
Father paused. "Your mother was the only person I ever really
loved besides you, Dana. My sister, I guess. And Scully.
And you." He looked away for a moment and quietly finished
his story. "Umm. . .your mother. . .an Ab rebel broke into the
central offices and blew up several rooms. Your mother was in
one of the rooms, doing her work. She died instantly."
"How old was I?"
"5 or 6 months. Headmaster took care of you for a while.
Do you remember that? He put me in a place where I couldn't
kill myself and he took you in."
I frowned. "Not really."
Father nodded distantly.
"You tried to kill yourself." The words, the idea was
breathtakingly horrifying. I knew he went crazy. I did not
know he had done that.
Father smiled, seemed to understand. "I'm okay now,
little Dana. I won't kill myself." He pulled something out
from under his shirt. "This was your mother's. When I die
you may have it."
I looked. A little gold cross. "Why did she have that?"
"It used to represent faith. Belief." Father's voice
was soft with grief. "Your mother always wore it. I
identified her body by this cross." He closed his eyes.
There was a movement in the hallway. "You should not
have told the little one." It was Headmaster. I turned my
head. Staring. Different. But not so different after all.
He still had fingers and legs and arms. Not like a true
Visitor.
Father looked up. There were tears in his eyes. He did
not seem surprised to see Headmaster. "I'm fine."
"You are not fine. You will be too fragile for our
meeting tomorrow with the Wayfarers."
"She was the only good thing in my life." Father
swallowed.
"I know." Headmaster's voice was gentle. "I know.
Come."
Like a child, my father went with Headmaster. I heard
his sobs, and I heard Headmaster quieting him.
I put the photos back so he would not have to see them
when Headmaster left, but I took one small photo. My mother
and my father smiling, laughing, caught in a snapshot. He had
one arm slung over her shoulder, the other holding an upraised
beer bottle, She was drinking from a yellow plastic cup. Their
hair
was mussed and their eyes were bright and their suits were all
askew.
As I grew older I would look at that photograph and
imagine I could hear them, could see them, laughing and
drinking and celebrating whatever it was they were
celebrating. I imagined her teasing him over some small thing
and his grin as he answered her back. As they were, whole,
before the Visitors came.
I knew I had not gotten the whole story. I did not
understand why the Visitors would use humans like my father.
That part. He was leaving something out.
Karol Ann told me the next afternoon. She tied her
blonde hair back in piece of string, began rolling sweet dough
for cinnamon rolls. "They want espers."
"What's an esper?"
"It's. . .your father is a high esper. So was your
mother. So are you."
I still didn't understand.
"It comes from the word ESP. Extra Sensory Perception.
It's not. . .right, for what they can do, but it's close.
It's why they didn't just kill us all." Karol Ann thought a
moment. "I have 4 babies and they all have just a glimmer of
it. All humans they let live now do. That's why they can use
our recruits in their stations. They can hear us think."
I must have frowned. "All our thoughts."
"No. Just some. Your father does it very well and so
did your mother. Your father can communicate directly with
all of them, because of some of his modifications. That's
very rare."
"Did you know my mother?"
"Dana Scully?" Carol Ann smiled. "We were both Special
Agents."
"Investigators?"
"Yes. I stayed friends with her after she started
working with your father. That's how I got this job after the
Changes. . ." Karol Ann considered the sweet dough in front
of her. "I was a CPA. That means I knew how numbers worked.
. ." A tear rolled down her face. "Skinner was. . .he was
your parents' boss before the Changes. He protected your
father, they say. That's why your father protects him. The
Visitors have wanted him shipped out. . ." She sighed, turned
to her cooking, would not speak to me anymore. I slid out of
the kitchen and went back to my study.
Skinner, when I asked him, would not talk about, just
leaned over my books and in his dry voice announced that we
would be discussing geography today.
Espers. I swirled the word around in my mouth. Esper
made us special so they didn't kill us. They let us breed.
Some of us they bred 'specially. Like me. If you had any
Visitor DNA that made you privileged. Like Father and Mother
and me. Why didn't they make all humans privilege? I did not
understand then, that some Visitor work required flesh, some
required basal workers. Space work mostly, where machines
were inefficient, and for our DNA source. Our proteins, the
basic material of our structure was so strong, stronger than
any other race they had come upon.
They did not want many privileged. They wanted some who
did certain kinds of work. They also created those very
precious few who were given what father sometimes called
"rights" so they could make deals and buy and sell and trade.
Father had rights. He was one of few. I would have rights
when I was older. My mother, I would later learn, did not
have rights, but her relationship to father protected her
adequately and her role as womb and mother to father's
children protected her completely. Those with rights were
a tiny class because there was only a little work we could do.
The large quantities were for ordinary humans. For what we
had been trained to call the "aborigines." Abs did not need
privileges or rights. They were simply used.
I did not, at that time, realize what rights Father had.
Other children who were privileged had whole staffs, but
father and I only had Karol Ann and Skinner and Ryan. I found out
later this was because father was even more fragile around a
full household staff. I also discovered that this fragility,
combined with his position was the reason for our isolation.
My father, in his job as liaison, had broad, encompassing
rights. He had a half-alien, half-human Visitor who took care
of him. He was pampered through his bad periods. He even had
power over many of the Visitors.
I would later learn that his importance was such that the
bomb--which destroyed an entire city block--had been meant for
my father; the bomber had not cared how many he took out, so
long as he killed my father; Headmaster had changed that
memory or my father would have collapsed forever. Instead my
father only knew what he had told me. No one told my father
differently because he had to live.
There were reasons he must live other than his work,
although I was kept carefully innocent of this. Other
children, Ab children, knew of my father's place, of his
second, hidden role, though my knowledge of it would only come
much later. My father led the rebellion, led the slowly
gathering storm forces of human anger and misery. Headmaster
aided and abetted, and many my father worked with helped him.
His abilities with the Visitors were unique and could be
turned in many different directions. He knew their secrets
and he knew he could destroy them.
Skinner was part of the rebellion. A big part of the
rebellion. I found that out later, that was why he was so
careful not to speak to me about anything important. He knew,
he thought they were watching me. Besides I was created from
Visitor Spawn. He feared I would betray them all. And when
I was grown, I was glad he had been cautious, because I might
have without knowing it, or meaning to, or planning it.
But at that time, I was eight. My world had been taken
and turned upside down. All that I had known had opened up
into a black pit and tried to swallow me whole. There had
been another world. There had not always been Visitors. My
father had loved my mother and my mother had died, but he
loved her still.
End